When you sell a physical product to a customer, he or she will want to know how it looks. Its texture. Its color. How it makes the customer feel.

Conveying this information is your main job-it’s the only way that you can convince him to take money out of his pocket and give it to you.

Even electronic component catalogs, the driest and most boring form of sales media, have high-definition photos of the chips and boards displayed in the datasheets, charts and tables.

If visual communication is so important for a company selling capacitors and resistors, how much more so for a store selling fashion, food or cosmetics?

Color is one of the main components of visual perception. Showing the customer all the color variations of your product is key in convincing him or her to make the buying decision. The more accurately you can convey color and texture, the lower the odds of the customer realizing the purse she bought subtly clashes with her dress and demanding a refund. This is especially important in ecommerce, where refunds and shipping are a significant expense.

Traditionally, brick and mortar retailers have solved this problem elegantly, by offering their users little books of color samples called swatches. You can see color swatches for paint, cosmetics and fabrics in many stores today. And many ecommerce platforms offer a swatch functionality as well. But until now, if you wanted to add color swatches to your Shopify store, you were limited to an ugly pulldown menu with generic web colors (“red, “black,” “purple”, etc.), unless you wanted to hire a developer or go digging through code yourself. Our friends with stores were complaining. So we decided to write an app to fix this.

With Swatchify, you can simply and elegantly add perfectly matched color swatches to your Shopify store with a few clicks.

Not only do you have an RGB color palette, where you can pick and click colors with a pipette tool, but we also added the ability to add two-tone color swatches and to capture complex textures from photos of your product and add them as swatches as well.

Give your customers an exact feel for how your product will look on them, on their shelf or in their living room-it’s never been easier.